MacBooks shipped with faulty drives?

Are certain MacBook hard drives chewing up data unexpectedly? Apparently so, if you believe U.K. data recovery firm Retrodata. They say that 2.5 inch Seagate SATA drives that were manufactured in China and which bear firmware revision 7.01 are prone to failure and what's more, have proven impossible to recover in many cases. Apparently, the problem lies in the drive head, which can become detached from the read/write arms, resulting in "deep scratches" in the face of the disk. What's more, unless the user stops using the disk immediately, the damage can make data recovery impossible. At the moment, Apple is "looking into" the issue but in the meantime, you might want to fire up that Apple System Profiler and check what kind of hard drive you're packing--just in case.

For more on the possible defect:
- see this InformationWeek article